Conclusion

The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS is a very competent, if unspectacular, standard zoom lens for the Sony A7R/A7 full-frame compact system cameras. It delivers excellent sharpness in the centre of the frame almost throughout its aperture range, even performing well wide-open, although you'll need to stop down quite a lot to get similar quality at the edges of the frame. The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens also suffers from distortion at both ends of the zoom range when shooting in the RAW format - the Sony A7/A7R automatically correct this for JPEG files - but as a lot of owners will no doubt be relying on RAW to deliver optimum quality, it does require some post-processing to remove it. The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS offers effective image stabilisation, quite fast and reliable auto-focusing on the A7R that we tested it with (although it doesn't perform so well in low-light), intuitive manual focusing and an acceptable level of build quality given the budget price, plus it's usefully weather-tight too. All in all, we'd recommend buying the lens with the Sony A7 as a kit, although would be A7R owners should probably wait for the Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm f/4 ZA OSS, if they can afford it...